If you like my art, sketches, stories, transformations you can find more like this on my Patreon page or in DeviatArt Premium Early Access folder for subscribers here. Every bit of support is truly appreciated, but just having you here means the most to me - without you, none of this would have been possible. Thank you very much!
Check also my shop at DeviantArt for other works
If you can’t find the story on Patreon and you’ve already subscribed, look for it on my Discord server for Patreon supporters (or just message me privately if it’s not there either)
A small room that combined a kitchen and a living space, one of many in that same apartment building on the outskirts of Madison, now looked strangely tidy, nothing like it had been just this morning. After all, in the morning, over there in that far corner by the wardrobe, boxes with notebooks, lecture notes, and printed lab materials had been lying in their usual organized chaos, along with piles of journals, mugs with dried coffee stains, and on the table a laptop had been towering, surrounded by cables and sticky-note scribbles. Now the boxes were neatly pushed under the bed, the table wiped to a matte shine, the chairs tucked in, and only one cup remained on the kitchen counter.
In the kitchen, the washing machine was slowly spinning its drum, as if it had already forgotten what it was actually meant to do. And it definitely hadn’t expected to spin its drum for the fourth time in a row, stubbornly grinding through yet another batch of clothes, bed linens, blankets, and everything else that existed in this apartment.
Emily Rivers, the one who rented this little box, stood in front of the mirror and didn’t recognize not only the place that just a year ago her own sister, with a hint of pride — though never showing it — had called “the lair of a genius,” “the den of a mad professor,” and sometimes simply “a place where a brain lives, not a person,” but which, in a matter of seconds, had then turned into “What a nightmare!”, “How can you live like this,” and of course her favorite, “this is rock bottom, honey.” Yeah, now it all looked completely different, just like Emily herself. Not that she could say she had gotten used to herself, but now… this was already too much. The dress her sister had given her gently hugged her waist and hips, as if purposely reminding her even more of the body that in a whole year still hadn’t become familiar. The fabric touched her skin evenly and insistently, the heels forced her to hold her back differently, and the bra straps, thin and firm, seemed to remind her of themselves with every breath, cutting into her shoulders and pulling down the weight she still didn’t know how to feel as her own.
— Well, — came a voice from the kitchen. — Dressed?
Emily let the question pass by. Maybe on purpose, maybe because right at that moment she swallowed the lump in her throat too hard, so hard her ears popped. She stared at her reflection, remembering the exact moment when she, still Andrew Rivers, a student and at the same time a lab assistant in the quantum mechanics department, had volunteered to connect herself to the lab equipment to test the experimental setup. Back then, Andrew Rivers had been that inconvenient student everyone appreciated yet feared a little: allowed near the equipment far too early, digging too deep into calculations, too confident he understood how reality should behave if pushed gently in the right place.
Formally, he was listed as a lab assistant doing routine work, but in fact it was he who had put together the model that allowed them to assume a transition between parallel branches was possible without destroying the identity. Consciousness as a stable structure. The body — as a variable.
The irony of the situation caught up with him later...Full story (13 200 characters - 4 parts + add. images) is open to subscribers here or on Patreon